Thursday, May 16, 2013

Selecting early-readers, chapter books
or short novels for grades 2/3 to 5 can be tricky.Varying reading abilities makes it
challenging to find interesting stories that aren't too difficult or too easy
to read.Illustrations are good, but this
group is moving out of picture books so you don’t want too many.Lots of white space on each page and large
text are also helpful for the novice reader. I'm big on humour, too.

Here’s a few of my current
favs for early readers (grades 2/3 to 5) with varying difficulty of texts.

snappy with fantastic
illustrations by Lane Smith. Lulu is a
pretty self-centred little girl who does learn (eventually -- and with some
interesting experiences along the way) that being nicer to those around her
(Mr. B, the Dogs, Fleischman) gets her more than being overly bossy and
tyrannical. Great narrator, too.

I'm late to discover Bad
Kitty but am glad I've found her. Lots of exaggerated circumstances cause Bad
Kitty to become more and more nervous and frighten of goofy, well-meaning Uncle Murray. His inexperience around cats means he’s not
aware of her ‘tender’ feelings and hair trigger reaction time. The
illustrations add a lot to the visual humour.

I’m a big fan of the
Clementine books by this author (check out Clementine and the Family Meeting
for a great intro to this clever little girl and her family) and hope Stuart’s
story would be as good. Stuart is a
worry wart plain-and-simple. Nothing is
too big or small to cause Stuart to fret.
Add a magic cape and life of this grade 3 student gets really
interesting. Though I thoroughly enjoyed this very short book for it’s
hyperbole I found it a bit more ‘message-y’ than the Clementine books. The slap stick humour will appeal to this
grade level easily.

Though I really liked this
one I do have one complaint. “Anna
Hibiscus lives in Africa. Amazing Africa.” This is
great. This is fantastic but I can’t figure out why the Nigerian-born author didn't specify which
country in Africa. We don’t get a lot of books written about
African characters by African writers and African countries have a tendency
to be lumped together with little acknowledgement of the wide diversity on this
continent. However, that being said the narrator’s voice, the plot (Anna
travels to Canada
to visit her maternal grandmother in the winter), and the descriptions of her
African family are well done and draw us into Anna’s adventure.

A few other honourable
mentions are Sadie and Ratz by Sonta Hartnett, Say What? by
Margaret Peterson Haddix andFat Bat and Swoop by Leo
Landry. These certainly have elements I
look for in early readers, but I found them a bit more message-y. I think kids will find the premise and humour
in each enjoyable, regardless.

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About Me

I am the reference coordinator at The Doucette Library of Teaching Resources, a curriculum library in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary.
I love connecting education students and teachers with engaging and exciting resources for classroom teaching. I believe that resources that get me excited (or those that get you excited) are the ones with the best potential to get kids interested in learning about - well, everything. Finding those books that connect to the real world are the ones I enjoy promoting the most.